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Most people don’t know what it means to have real courage until they are faced with a situation that requires them to be courageous. For me, it wasn’t until eighth grade that I found out how courageous I could be. My family had just moved from a small town in Arizona to its biggest city, Phoenix, and it was my first time attending a new school. Before moving, I had lived in the same house my whole life, and many of the people who were in my seventh-grade class had been in school with me since kindergarten. After moving, I didn’t know anybody in any of my classes, and even the campus seemed too big and uninviting.
For the first couple of weeks, I was too shy to try to make new friends. At my old school, even if I tried to make a new friend, I always had my old friends as backup. However, now that I had no friends at all, the idea of having my feelings hurt from being rejected by someone I wanted to be friends with was just too scary. Instead, I would sit by myself under a big pine tree in the courtyard, watching the other kids laugh and joke with their cliques at lunch. I tried to figure out which group I could join. There were the cheerleaders, a small group of girls who sat at the table farthest away from me. Next to them were the athletes, a much bigger crowd of boys and girls who played baseball, basketball, and soccer together and had formed strong bonds by being part of a team. They all wore their maroon-and-yellow jerseys, sweatshirts, and hats, showing off their team spirit and getting excited for the next big game. I wasn’t athletic, so I didn’t feel like I would ever fit in as one of their ‘teammates’.
Between me and the athletes there were several more tables, all filled with energetic dancers, thoughtful theater kids, and noisy band members with their instrument cases spread over the table along with the peanut butter sandwiches and bags of carrot sticks. I didn’t feel like I matched any of these groups. At my old school, I was friends with everyone, and we didn’t have to share a hobby in order to have plenty in common. It seemed as though all of these groups shared one specific thing with each other, which I didn’t share with any of them. One day, I noticed someone else sitting like me: quiet and alone in the shade of one of the courtyard’s big pine trees. She was small and brown-haired, reading a book while she munched on an apple, she had pulled out of the crumpled paper lunch sack that sat on the ground next to her. Strangely, this girl seemed perfectly happy to sit by herself, and I guessed that was the reason she hadn’t introduced herself to me or asked me to sit with her.
On Friday of my third week at this school, I was beginning to feel very depressed. I felt like I would never have a friend here, and the idea made me sadder than I had ever been. As I watched the brown-haired reader under her tree, I decided that I couldn’t live like this, friendless, forever. Even though I was shy, and even though I was afraid of being rejected, I stood up and carried my lunch to the other girl’s pine tree. My hands were shaking, and I felt my face sweating and turning bright red, but I told her my name and asked, “Is it all right if I sit by you?”. The girl set down her book and nodded, and after she told me that her name was Mindy, we started talking about what kinds of things we liked to do, how we felt about our school, and where we came from. It turned out that she was new there too, and just like me, she had been afraid that she would never fit in. We had both been sitting alone and feeling sad because we were too afraid to walk up to someone and say hello.
After talking to each other that day, Mindy and I found out that we both loved to read science fiction novels, we both watched old cartoons like The Jetsons after school, and we both loved to draw and paint. Now, two years later, Mindy and I are still close friends, and we do all of those activities together. Even though it was scary to say hi to her that first day, I am so glad that I was able to gather up the courage to do it. There are a lot of things in life that may seem too difficult and intimidating to ever accomplish, but with just a little courage, we can open up a whole world of possibilities that we would otherwise miss out on.
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